Chapter 6
Six months later…
I’d become a master at passing the time. Business had never been better.
Not that her brothers hadn’t tried to stop me.
As soon as the news spread, Enzo and Matteo Ferraro came after me with the ferocity of a pack. They tried to disrupt my business in Europe, blocking my suppliers in Milan and using the family name to shut doors in Paris.
There was a nasty media battle. Half the tabloids painted me as the scoundrel of the year, the monster who humiliated Princess Ferraro at the altar.
The other half, more perceptive, speculated about the abrupt end of the relationship, wondering what kind of secret she might be hiding to make a man like me run away.
I let them have their little circus in Europe. Instead, I went out into the rest of the world.
While they tried to salvage their sister’s honor back home, I closed the deal in Shanghai.
I crushed a competitor in New York—one Matteo had coveted for years.
I outmaneuvered them; I was faster and more ruthless.
I made it clear that the Ferraros didn’t own everything, as they thought they did.
My empire grew, my fortune swelled, and my name became synonymous with ruthless success.
But success, I discovered, had a hollow taste.
I was in my apartment in Dubai, 70 stories above the desert, but the thrill of victory brought no warmth. The air conditioning was set to eighteen degrees, an artificial chill that fought against the forty-five degrees outside. The air smelled of new leather and nothing else.
I wasn’t drunk. It had been months since I’d been able to get drunk.
Alcohol didn’t work anymore. The blind rage from that day on the jet—against her, against Silvio, and against myself—had solidified into something dense and unyielding.
A spent rage that had settled deep in my chest and refused to leave.
I told myself I’d forgotten her. Bianca Ferraro was a miscalculation, an ugly footnote in my success story.
That was a lie…
She was the only thing on my mind.
I relived that morning: Silvio’s face, contorted with triumph, the photos, the reports, and my own pathetic escape.
The anger wasn’t about her anymore—it was about me. For believing so quickly.
I was in my suite, the setting sun over Dubai painting the sky a sickly orange. My hand hovered over the digital safe hidden behind an abstract painting.
I should have destroyed Silvio’s “evidence.” I should have burned every scrap of paper, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
I kept them. I scanned every page and every photo. I needed the reminder, the poison close at hand, to remind me never to be so foolish again.
But six months later, it was no longer a reminder. It was an itch. With unsteady hands—and I hated the weakness—I opened the encrypted file on my laptop.
BIANCA_FERRARO_BETRAYAL_FILE.
The pathetic title I’d given it at the height of my pain.
The images appeared on the screen, sharp and merciless.
First, the financial report. The deficit at Ferraro Uomo. The impending bankruptcy.
I stared at it. Yet I was no longer the heartbroken man. I was the CEO, and I had spent the last six months watching the market like a hawk.
Something didn’t add up…
Immediately after the “wedding,” the press predicted the Ferraros’ downfall.
But Bianca didn’t fall. She didn’t hide.
She didn’t sell off assets. Instead, she fought back.
She closed a merger in Asia—a brilliant, aggressive move that I had been planning to make after our merger.
She wasn’t bleeding; she was conquering.
The numbers in Silvio’s report were garbage. Fake, grossly inflated.
A chill traced my spine—something new. Not from love, not from anger.
The adrenaline of the hunt.
If the financial report was a sham… what else was?
I opened the photos. Bianca, laughing at the bar. Bianca, entering the palazzo. Her lover.
I grabbed my personal cell phone. I dialed Corrado’s number—my private investigator in Rome: a man who uncovered secrets even the Vatican couldn’t hide.
“Corrado. I have a job for you.” My voice was calm, but my heart was pounding, beating fast and fiercely. “I’m sending you a photo. I want a name. I want everything. Adesso (Now).”
I didn’t have to wait long. Corrado was efficient.
Two hours later, my phone vibrated. It was an email.
Name: Giovanni Bellini. Occupation: Art curator.
Status: Married to Luca Anselmi for ten years.
Connection to Bianca Ferraro: business partner in the Ferraro family’s charitable art fund.
Bellini is notoriously—and publicly—gay.
The night of the photos: The art fund’s gala dinner.
The “palazzo” was Bellini and his husband’s home.
The air left my lungs. The room, suddenly felt airless.
Gay.
THE LOVER WAS GAY!
My hands were sweating; even the air conditioning failed to cool me. Clammy sweat gathered at the back of my neck.
Silvio used me… He manipulated my ego as a businessman, turning my self-made pride against me.
Silvio lied about the lover, about the bankruptcy…
But… what if he didn’t lie about the pregnancy?
Six weeks.
I grabbed my calendar. I went back six months. Then, another six weeks.
The date hit me like a punch.
That night in my apartment, when I held her in my arms and kissed every inch of her… when she was mine before the wedding.
God…
No. No.
Silvio said she was pregnant by someone else. That was the lie. He used the pregnancy against me, but he distorted the most important fact.
The child…
The child wasn’t Giovanni Bellini’s.
The child was mine.
The investigative rush vanished, replaced by the most absolute, visceral panic I’ve ever felt.
I wasn’t tricked into marrying a woman who was pregnant with another man’s child. I was manipulated into abandoning a woman who was pregnant with my child.
The humiliation from six months ago was nothing compared to the horror consuming me. The whiskey, the jet, the ring tossed into the wind… I didn’t just reject her—I abandoned her at the very moment she needed me most.
I rushed to the phone, clammy sweat running down my back. I called Corrado again.
“Corrado. I need one more thing. Now! I want a photo of Bianca Ferraro—preferably from today.”
This time, the wait wasn’t two hours. It was twenty minutes. Twenty minutes during which I paced back and forth like a man trapped in a cage.
My cell phone vibrated.
It was an email. Just an attachment.
It wasn’t a paparazzi photo. It was a sharp, high-resolution photo taken from across the street from the Ferraro Uomo headquarters.
Bianca was leaving the building. She wasn’t facing the camera. She was in profile, talking to an assistant. She was wearing a dark, impeccably tailored blazer. But even that blazer couldn’t hide the impossible curve of her profile.
Pregnant!
Not “six weeks.” She was visibly, undeniably, pregnant. At least seven months…
My phone slipped from my unsteady hand.
Oh my God…
Silvio had told many lies, but the pregnancy was real.
And the father… the father wasn't Giovanni Bellini.
I was the father.
I picked up my cell phone from the floor and quickly dialed the numbers, even though my fingers were shaking.
“Get the jet ready. Now! I’m heading back to Milan.”
It was all a lie, a manipulation, a farce so elaborate, so perfectly crafted to feed on my worst fears, my pride as a self-made man, my hatred for the ancient bloodline of Alessandro Ferraro.
Silvio…
That bastard used me as a scalpel to carry out his revenge.
I felt a sour taste rise in my throat. The momentum of the chase vanished, replaced by violent nausea.
I ran. I tripped on the rug, slamming my knee into the lacquered corner of the coffee table. The pain had barely subsided.
I rushed into my private bathroom and threw up. It wasn’t last night’s whiskey; it was six months’ worth of poison. I convulsed violently, expelling the rot of the lie I’d swallowed whole.
I leaned against the cold stone, gasping for breath, as clammy sweat broke out on my forehead. I lifted my face.
The man in the mirror was a pale stranger with wide eyes—not from anger, but from utter horror.
With only my ragged breathing in the room, the final piece—the real truth—fell into place.
Silvio lied about the company, about the lover, about the money… but he didn’t lie about the pregnancy. He didn’t need to…
He just used her.
My mind returned to the image of Bianca in my bed, her dark hair scattered across my silk pillow, her skin flushed from the effort. The memory of her arching against me.
Six weeks after that night, Silvio showed up with a “six-week” report.
It was almost as if he’d planned it all, including that…
God…
It wasn’t another man’s child. It was mine!
My breath escaped in a single, painful hiss. The nausea gave way to a panic so deep, so visceral, that it made my legs give way. I fell backward, collapsing onto the bathroom floor.
What have I done?
The Duomo returned in brutal flashes: six hundred witnesses, the empty altar, the look on her brothers’ faces.
The image that formed in my mind this time wasn’t that of the triumphant betrayer, but one infinitely worse… Bianca was there, at the altar, waiting for me. Alone and humiliated in front of her entire world… and pregnant with my child.
Meanwhile, I… was on a jet, drunk, celebrating my escape, throwing her wedding ring into the void.
“No…” The sound that escaped me was a groan. “No, no, no!”
Her humiliation. The abandonment. The loneliness of discovering the pregnancy—our pregnancy—and then being publicly rejected by the father.
The horror of what I’d done was so great it suffocated me. I wasn’t just a fool who’d been deceived. I was a monster… I’d abandoned an innocent woman and my own son.
Horror took over. There was no more calculation or business. There was only one primitive instinct: fix this!
I jumped to my feet, slipping on the marble floor. I ran to the bedroom. I ignored the expensive suit thrown over a chair, put on just a shirt, grabbed my passport from the drawer, and picked up my cell phone and wallet from a sideboard in the corner.
I didn’t bother with luggage—I didn’t need anything.
I hit the button for the private elevator with my fist.
Hurry, hurry, hurry!
The metal box descended 70 floors. The sensation of falling was real. I was plummeting toward the hell I had created for myself.
I rushed through the hotel’s opulent lobby, like a whirlwind of crumpled sweatshirts and panic. The concierge, accustomed to my unpredictable behavior, barely raised an eyebrow.
“Signor Valenti…”
“My car. Now!”
The hot, humid air of Dubai hit me like an oven as I stepped out into the entrance. The black Bentley glided to a stop.
“The private hangar,” I barked at the driver as I got into the back seat. “Drive like hell is on our heels.”
“Yes, sir.”
The car accelerated. I threw my head back, feeling the cool leather against my hot neck. I closed my eyes…
I didn’t see Dubai’s skyscrapers, only Bianca’s face. It had none of the mocking expression Silvio had painted, nor the passionate one I’d seen in my bed, but the face of a woman I’d abandoned.
“Hang in there, Bianca,” I whispered to the tinted glass. The car was racing toward the airport, but I knew that no matter how fast the jet flew,
I would never get there fast enough to undo what I had done.